The explosive growth of digital communications technology has resulted in an ever-increasing demand for bandwidth for communicating digital information, such as data, audio and/or video information. To keep pace with the increasing bandwidth demands, new or improved network components and technologies must constantly be developed to perform effectively at the ever-increasing data rates. In optical communication systems, however, the cost of deploying improved optical components becomes prohibitively expensive at such higher data rates. For example, it is estimated that the cost of deploying a 40 Gbps optical communication system would exceed the cost of existing 10 Gbps optical communication systems by a factor of ten. Meanwhile, the achievable throughput increases only by a factor of four.
Thus, much of the research in the area of optical communications has attempted to obtain higher throughput from existing optical technologies. For example, a number of techniques have been proposed or suggested to employ multi-carrier transmission techniques over fiber channels. Conventional multi-carrier transmission techniques, however, space the multiple carriers so that they do not interfere with one another. The required carrier spacing, however, leads to poor spectral efficiency and thus limits the throughput that can be achieved within the available frequencies. A further proposal has suggested the use of orthogonal carrier frequencies to minimize interference. A system employing orthogonal carrier frequencies, however, will require an all-digital implementation that is particularly challenging with existing analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters at optical rates (10 Gbps and higher).
A need therefore exists for a multi-carrier transmission technique that provides improved spectral efficiency and allows for an analog implementation. Among other benefits, improved spectral efficiency will allow greater tolerance to dispersion and the use of generic and available optical technologies.